Astrofest Višnjan 2025.
On Saturday, the 21st of June, Lina participated in the science festival Astrofest in Višnjan, Istria. Every year, this festival welcomes people from all over Croatia, as well as neighbouring Slovenia, who are eager to learn about STEM. Topics range from astronomy and physics to chemistry, biology, geology, and many other areas. Even though the workshops are mostly children-oriented, there are a lot of lectures for people of all ages, with speakers who are experts in their area. This year, Lina held a workshop on ants’ thermoregulation. The children could learn about the importance of ants, nest construction, colony foundation, thermoregulatory properties of nests and how ants modify their behaviour in response to high or low temperatures. They were excited to see live ants under the thermal camera and surprised by the variety of conditions in which ants live. A lot of them were already familiar with some of the local species and were glad to talk about the ants in their gardens. A lot of children also knew many fun facts about ants from different encyclopedias or popular videos.
This was a unique opportunity to present our project topic to a local audience of Istria, which is especially important to us because part of our fieldwork takes place in the Brijuni National Park, Istria. It’s always amazing to see how fast children learn and how many of them are interested in ants. We hope to bring awareness about ants in a warming world to many more people in future workshops and come back to Astrofest next year!